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school. I met a former Senate aide, another man who’d been U.S. karate champion while in the army. I introduced myself to a number of people: a group standing together who had been undergraduates at Harvard; a man who’d been a paralegal in New York City; the M.D. whose name I’d noticed in the entry ledger. She had interrupted her residency at the University of California, she told me, because she thought law school “might be fun.”
    As I met my classmates that day and in the next few weeks I was often amazed by the range of achievements. About two fifths of them had been out of college for at least a year and few had wasted the time. Around twenty of the people in the section had other advanced degrees, and many more had been successful in previous careers. There was an inventor, an architect, a research scientist, a farmer, mothers, a number of businessmen, three women who’d been social workers, many former college instructors, three reporters, ex-servicemen, people who’d had significant jobs in government. Nor were the men and women who’d come direct from college less impressive. If anything, their undergraduate records were more outstanding than those of us who’d been out, many of the younger people, if not most, summa cum laudes from the best-known universities in the country.
    But more than the array of résumé glories that each person could present, I was taken in those first few weeks with the personal force of those around me. After ten years in universities I was accustomed to being surrounded by bright people. Yet I had never been in a group where everybody was as affable, outgoing, articulate, as magically able to make his energy felt by others. I had been told that my classmates would be academic privateers and cutthroats, but as I wandered around the Harkness green, sun-dazed and excited and a little bit drunk, I felt a little like one of the astronauts, headed for adventure with the most prime and perfect companions anyone could choose.
    Indeed, that impression was not far from the truth. The process of selection which brought each of us to that green was rigorous. In the past decade, the race for admission to all the law schools in the country has grown remarkably thick and heated. The number of persons enough interested in law school each year to take the LSAT has quadrupled since 1964, and since 1971, when the crunch became especially pronounced, there have been more than twice as many law school applicants each year as there have been places.
    The reasons for the incredible law school boom are varied. Certainly the birthrates after World War II, the end of the draft, and the drought in university-level teaching jobs, which has discouraged enrollment in other graduate schools, are all significant factors. So too are national episodes like Vietnam and Watergate, which have inspired many to look to law as a means by which change can be accomplished. Probably most important in accounting for the sudden rise in applications is the fact that minorities, and especially women—groups virtually excluded in the past—are now seeking legal education in large numbers.
    One of the results of this boom in interest has been a boom in the number of lawyers. Law school enrollments have grown rapidly, and in 1974 there were nearly 30,000 young lawyers graduated, three times more than were graduated ten years earlier and far too many for the legal job market to absorb. The Department of Labor estimated that there were only 16,500 positions available that year for new attorneys.
    In consequence, the battle has grown ever more intense for admission to “name” law schools; Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, University of California (Boalt Hall), Penn, NYU, and Virginia are most often listed as the top flight. It is only the graduates of those schools, and law review editors at some others, who continue to have job opportunities as extensive as